Milford immigrant's journey leads to Natick Labs

Before he hit his lucky number - 5-5-55 - Vittorio Palumbo spent several years in Mussolini's indoctrination school, a few more in a refugee camp, then returned to his family's farm in Libya. More recently, he has saved American soldiers' lives with his innovative designs.

By Julia Spitz/Daily News staff

MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA

By Julia Spitz/Daily News staff

Posted May. 8, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 8, 2013 at 8:04 AM

By Julia Spitz/Daily News staff

Posted May. 8, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 8, 2013 at 8:04 AM

» Social News

Before he hit his lucky number - 5-5-55 - Vittorio Palumbo spent several years in Mussolini's indoctrination school, a few more in a refugee camp, then returned to his family's farm in Libya.

More recently, he has saved American soldiers' lives with his innovative designs.

In between are twists and turns such as leaving his teen bride, Rosalba, waiting at the dock in New York after an accident put him in the hospital on the way to get her, and their years working together, first at Jordan Marsh in Shoppers World, then at Natick Labs.

The Milford residents' experiences are the sort you'd expect to read in a book - and you can. Vittorio's self-published "Italian Days, Arabian Nights'' is available through the Harvard Book Store at harvard.com.

But it's perhaps even more amazing to hear them directly from the source, while sitting in the kitchen of the home they've shared for most of their 52 years of marriage.

The story begins in Campo di Giove, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, and returns there at pivotal points throughout Vittorio's eight decades, but it also circles back to Libya, where he spent a few months when he was 6, and then returned after World War II.

His family was among the thousands of Italians who left to settle what was then a colony of Italy.

"They give the house, they give everything,'' he remembers of what settlers received from the Italian government led by dictator Benito Mussolini. "But the land was all sand.''

With irrigation, the Italian farmers were able to turn the sand into fertile ground where the Palumbo family grew peanuts, sweet potatoes and other crops. But only a few months after arriving in Libya, "the government came to the house to see what children we had. ... They took me and my brother, Giovanni (who was 11). They didn't want the older ones so much. They took us back to Italy. It was a military type of school,'' he recalled of the indoctrination camp for children in Fiera di Primiero.

From 1940-43, "we stayed in that school,'' but after Mussolini's ouster, "we had no place to go. An aunt came to pick us up. We stayed with my aunt during the war. ... Germans invaded the town. We had to stay in the Majella mountains,'' in a makeshift home with 30 people. After the Germans left, "we had to start all over again. What a mess they left.''

Meanwhile, elder brother Gennaro, a soldier in the Italian army, had been taken to Camp Stanley in Taunton as a prisoner of war, then sent back to Italy. In 1945, "he found where we were. He went to the embassy. He had to take us to a refugee camp in Rome. I was 12. My brother (Gennaro) was 24. Giovanni was 17.''

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Vittorio spent three years at the camp in Rome, "waiting for my quota to come to go back to Libya.'' At the refugee camp, he learned how to be a tailor, and also met a teacher who would later help him immigrate to America.

But before America, there was a trip back to Libya after eight years without seeing his parents.

It "was not easy,'' he said of the readjustment. "My mother used to say, when we did something wrong, 'He doesn't belong to us, he belongs to Mussolini.' ''

There was also conflict with his father over his career. "I wanted to be a tailor so bad. My father didn't like the idea. He wanted me to be a butcher. He sent me to Tripoli for a year to learn to be a butcher.''

The family then returned to Italy, and his father opened a butcher shop. "I did the best I can,'' but he jumped at the chance to come to America, and arrived aboard the Cristoforo Colombo on May 5, 1955. "It was a lucky day.'' After a short stay with an uncle in Albany, he ended up with a cousin in Milford, while his brothers found new lives for themselves in Venezuela.

He eventually found work as a tailor at Jordan Marsh, and also started looking for a girlfriend. The one he set his eyes on, the daughter of a local police chief of Irish descent, came with a warning from Palumbo's friend: "Her father will cut your head off if he finds out she's dating an Italian boy.''

So, by mail, he began courting Rosalba, then 15, back in Campo di Giove. After he became an American citizen in 1960, he returned to Italy to marry her. About 275 people attended the wedding, said Rosalba.

There was another separation as he returned to Milford on his own and waited for her arrival several months later. On the way to New York to meet the boat, "he got in a big car accident,'' said Rosalba.

"Everyone went home but me,'' she recalled, but, thanks to help from the Ventrascas, the landlords of the North Street apartment where Vittorio had been living, a cousin of Rosalba's in Walpole was alerted and went to get her.

When they got to the hospital in New Rochelle, N.Y., her new husband "was like a mummy'' in a full body cast, said Rosalba.

His extensive injuries kept him in the hospital for three months. Back in Framingham, Jordan Marsh supervisors let Rosalba take over for her husband. After his recovery, "we used to work together'' for five years, she said.

She took time off to raise their children, Cristina and Steven, and the couple later worked together at the Soldier Systems Center Command in Natick (Natick Labs), where Vittorio's design talents earned a patent for a reversible uniform. After a tragedy that killed 11 soldiers who drowned while wearing their bulletproof vests, he worked on making a vest that can come apart.

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"They said, 'You saved so many lives,' '' with that vest, Rosalba recalled her husband being told.

In the end, the saga has a simple moral.

"America was good to me. I was good to America,'' said Vittorio, who still works at Natick Labs part time.